Editorial FDA works to ensure a safer food supply

The Food and Drug Administration's warning to the cantaloupe industry that growers and packers will face additional inspections this year should not be a surprise.

Two very serious food-borne illness outbreaks traced to cantaloupes, and the enactment of stricter federal food safety regulations, should have made a cantaloupe crackdown a foregone conclusion.

Frankly, it's about time.

Congress passed the Food Safety Modernization Act in 2010, but it wasn't until two years later that the Obama administration unveiled proposed rules that would implement the legislation.

It is the first overhaul of the nation's food regulatory system in 70 years and administration officials said they wanted to get it right.

Unfortunately, while the administration was contemplating new standards, some 14 multistate outbreaks of food-borne illness occurred, including the problems with cantaloupe.

In 2011, listeria contaminated cantaloupe that had been harvested from a far near Holly, Colo. Some 33 people died and 147 were sickened. The listeria bacteria was found in standing pools of water, and food safety inspectors said the farm erred by using improperly sanitized processing equipment.

Conditions at an Indiana cantaloupe-packing facility resulted in a salmonella outbreak last year that sickened 261 and killed three.

The situations, particularly the one in Colorado, seriously damaged other cantaloupe growers.

The FDA's warning about increased inspections, which will target a "subset" of cantaloupe operations, is an effort to assess conditions and catch problematic practices.

"In the event of adverse findings, we will take action as needed to protect the public health," said Michael M. Landa, director of the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.

It's a message growers appear to have taken seriously.

Michael Hirakata, chairman of the Rocky Ford Growers Association in southeastern Colorado, told The Associated Press that growers in the region have taken steps to reassure the public their melons are not tainted. They have spent nearly $1 million on safety upgrades.

It was unfortunate that a broad swath of cantaloupe growers in the state who had no problems with contamination suffered as a result of the isolated problems other farms.

But the stepped-up safety measures that growers have put in place and the FDA inspections targeting cantaloupes should help prevent future food-borne illness outbreaks and assure the public that food safety is being taken seriously.